Business Metrics: Better Mind What You Measure
by Paul Wiefels Managing Director,
The Chasm Group, LLC

This article addresses the need for executives running high technology firms to understand and actively manage an appropriate set of metrics based on the type of strategy that is actually deployed.

My original partner in The Chasm Group, Geoffrey Moore, recalls a story in his family concerning his great-grandfather, Dan, who being a man of his times valued frugality perhaps to excess. It seems that he was cleaning out the medicine cabinet one day reading each of the labels on the medicine, finally deciding that maybe he did have a little bit of this and he might just benefit from that. So he took every one of the leftover medicines rather than throwing any of them out… (more)

Looking In From the Outside

Today, the pressure is on to deliver on the demands of customers and investors—and to do it right now. More than ever, every business executive needs to be thinking carefully about how markets develop and how to sustain them, what customers and markets value, how to best serve these markets, and how to reallocate resources to succeed. As a company’s business model shifts to meet changing market requirements, its business strategy and IT infrastructure must be ready to shift as well… (more)

Products and Services: How Oil and Water Can Mix
by Paul Wiefels Managing Director,
The Chasm Group, LLC

This article explores the need for high technology firms to decide on an optimal product/service mix is they are to provide value to customers at every step of the life cycle.

During the nineties, most of us in Silicon Valley focused on and relentlessly pursued the hypergrowth phase of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle—that steep rise in the bell curve that we call the tornado (and described previously in my article entitled Storm Warnings). This phase of market development is almost always led and dominated by products, not services. Why products? In markets where demand… (more)